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I have mostly kept quiet this year about the election, for a variety of reasons. For those reasons and other reasons, this may well be my only election-related post during this presidential election. But, I have something to say and want to get it on the record now, before Super Tuesday and the Texas primary. So, here goes.

This year is likely to result in the most distressing lineup of general-election candidates to be President of the United States that we have seen during my lifetime. It seems highly likely that, come November, we will be asked to choose between two or more candidates who, apparently, either do not understand or do not take seriously the office of President and its duties and limitations as set out in the Constitution.

As Americans—regardless of where we fall on (or off) of the left-right spectrum—we should expect and demand that a President, or even a candidate for President, do certain things and uphold certain values. After all,

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, [the President] shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:—”I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

And, as you know, the Constitution of the United States includes, among many other things, a Bill of Rights, consisting of the first ten Amendments to the Constitution. These Amendments protect and codify—but do not create—certain fundamental human rights, which any American government and any American President must—legally must and morally must—respect. These include the free choice and exercise of religion; freedom of speech; freedom of the press; freedom “peaceably to assemble;” freedom to petition the government to redress grievances; “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms;” security against unreasonable searches, seizures, and arrests; the right to a jury trial; the right not to testify when doing so would incriminate oneself; and many others.

In electing a President, only two things are of first importance to me (or should should be to anyone else): (1) God’s claim on my conscience and (2) the Constitution. For this reason, I look for candidates who respect free speech and freedom of religion, who are not afraid of a free citizenry, and who will, above all else, respect the sanctity and dignity of all human life, from the weakest and smallest to the strongest and more powerful among us. I certainly look for conservatives and people of faith, but even those criteria are secondary to respect for human life and the rule of law. I cannot and will not vote for any candidate who does not respect humanity or human liberty or whose personal history and moral character reveal that any such respect may be no more than a political and rhetorical device.

To put it simply: a candidate for President must respect human life, human dignity, the Constitution, and the rule of law as opposed to the rule of men. All else is secondary.

Regardless of how Trump stacks up compared to any other candidate he might hypothetically face in November, he doesn’t measure up and has not demonstrated to me that he possesses the personal qualities, convictions, or moral compass necessary to do the job. So, if Trump is the Republican nominee, conservatives will not be tasked with choosing the “lesser of two evils” or the least ill-suited candidate. We will face a choice between one form of unqualified, irresponsible, unconstitutional governance and another. As a Christian, an American, a lawyer, and a citizen of this great nation, I cannot vote for anyone who lacks respect for human dignity or the law of the land simply because some opponent of his seems to share the same failings.

As any reader of this site over the 17 years I have run it will know, I am a conservative, in the sense that Burke, Kirk, and Reagan (among many others) were conservative. That does not mean I am a Republican. In fact, although I would have called myself a Republican in the past, I don’t consider myself one anymore. It’s one of those “I didn’t leave the party; the party left me” situations. I, like so many other people, am incredibly frustrated by both major parties, “politics as usual,” and the moral malleability of many career politicians. So while Republicans may often get my vote, they are not entitled to it simply because of the initial after their names. They, like anyone else, have to earn it on the merits of their convictions and their actions.

I will vote in the Texas primary elections tomorrow, and I will vote according to my conscience. When I vote in November, I will vote the same way, guided by the same conscience and the same principles. Therefore, I will not vote for Donald Trump tomorrow. He fails on the most basic criteria: respect for human life and dignity, and respect for the Constitution.

And if common sense fails and Trump is the Republican nominee, I will not vote for him in November, either. My conscience will not allow it. I would love to see a constitutionalist President who is conservative, reverent, humble, good, fair, and courageous. Simply electing a Republican because he obtained the Republican nomination, however, does not guarantee any of those things.

If your state has not yet held its primary or caucus, I hope you will take seriously your civic responsibility to vote. I hope that you will vote, and that you will vote according to your conscience. And I hope that, when you do so but before you cast your ballot, you ask yourself: “Does this person respect human life at all ages, in all conditions, and in all times and places, and will this person preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States?”

Please vote for someone who loves life and loves the Constitution. We are all counting on you.

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If you read this blog regularly, you know I have a lot on my plate. Here’s a quick snapshot of what I’m up to.

My startup, Cereblitz, makes the world’s first e-commerce platform and shopping cart for truly custom and customizable products. It’s great for just about all other products, too, of course! Check out the link above or check the Cereblitz blog for the latest news.

I’m also running Sport and Safety, an e-commerce site selling sporting and safety goods.

I was amazed and humbled by how many people voted for me in the primaries and in the main election, not to mention by the many kind comments that people made. I am excited about the opportunity to serve the community as a moderator, and I am grateful for the support of everyone who voted.

For those who wonder, this will actually have a relatively small impact on how much time I spend on Stack Overflow. Between my work and my own curiosity, I have already been on there quite a bit.

If you want to see the system in action, please check out SportAndSafety.com, a small business that Sarah and I have launched to sell sporting goods and safety products. You can also look at safeathand.com, a business that I helped found many years ago (and have since sold) and that now runs on the Cereblitz platform.

Don’t forget to bookmark the Cereblitz blog and follow us on your favorite social network:

One of the side-effects of this, of course, is that I have left legal practice behind. I started law school ten years ago, and started my first legal job exactly seven years ago today. And now, I am not practicing law at all. It’s a little surreal. On the other hand, I have been programming almost my entire life (since I was learning to read), and I was running a software development company before law school, so this is not really a second career. It’s more like a return to my first career.

Anyway, thanks for joining me on this thrilling, crazy ride. Please remember to sign up for my newsletter so I can keep you up to date on everything!

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When I enrolled at Rice University, I thought I would dual-major in math and physics en route to a Ph.D. in physics, a university professorship, and a career relishing the life of the mind in the esoteric realms of the subatomic. No, I had known that I would do that since sometime in middle school.

Within a semester, I had doubts that my career path lay in academic physics. By the end of my freshman year, I knew pure physics was not for me; I was considering biophysics, physical chemistry, and other, physics-adjacent disciplines. By the end of my third semester, no majors involving the name “physics” were even on my radar. I ended up, after some soul-searching and a year of exploration and reflection, settling on majors in math and religious studies, the latter with a concentration in Judaism.

Why? It wasn’t that I had lost my interest in physics as a subject; I still haven’t. It wasn’t my grades. It wasn’t even that I was unhappy with the work I was doing.

What really drove me off was this: I found that the kind of physics I wanted to do—the cutting-edge, theoretical stuff—was disturbingly full of hand-waving. That is, the really tough problems were either ignored entirely or roundly dismissed as inconsequential, even if they had potentially huge significance for the entire field. These were problems in which no one was doing any serious investigation—indeed, serious investigation might not even be possible under the current state of the art—but “we” supposedly “knew” something was true. Nine times out of ten, statements of this sort were literally accompanied by hand-waving by the professor or teacher’s assistant making the statement. In at least one incident, I witnessed a Nobel laureate brush off a series of hard-hitting questions in precisely this manner.

This is not to say that no one ever attempted to explain such things. Usually, the explanation was a deus ex machina based on the “standard model” or an appeal to authority. The thinking seemed to be this: If you don’t know the answer, just refer vaguely to the standard model, Einstein, Heisenberg, or Feynman, and the troublesome freshman/sophomore/high-schooler will get the idea that he or she is out of his or her depth and leave you alone. Even if the question was perfectly reasonable. There’s no grant money for investigating pesky “side effects” that show up in 200-level labs but that we can’t explain. “No grant money” means “forget about it.”

With all of the latest buzz about the so-called “multiverse” and, relatedly, parallel universes, at least a few of my beefs with academic physics have gone mainstream. In particular, Rod Dreher has posted an excellent piece about the faith of the physics academy. Some key quotes:

Physicists have a nerve. I know one (I’ll call him Mark) who berates every religious person he meets, yet honestly thinks there exist parallel universes, exactly like our own, in which we all have two noses. He refuses to give any credit to Old Testament creation myths and of course sneers at the idea of transubstantiation. But, without any sense of shame, he insists in the same breath that humans are made from the fallout of exploded stars; that it is theoretically possible for a person to decompose on one side of a black hole and recompose on the other, and that there are diamonds in the sky the size of the moon.

. . . .

I have never quite understood why the “many-universes” theory is considered science, not religion. How could you ever falsify the thesis?

. . . . We assume that the Scientist must know what he’s talking about no matter what he says, because he has studied his field, and is committed to a rigorous methodology and epistemology that rules out what cannot be known empirically. If a Scientist says it, it must be true, because it has either been proven experimentally, or can be.

. . . .

. . . . [C]ertainty in the sense of probability is not the same thing as necessary being: If I toss a coin, it is certain that I will get heads or tails, but that outcome depends on my tossing the coin, which I may not necessarily do. Likewise, any particular universe may follow from the existence of a multiverse, but the existence of the multiverse remains to be explained. In particular, the universe-generating process assumed by some multiverse theories is itself contingent because it depends on the action of laws assumed by the theory. The latter might be called meta-laws, since they form the basis for the origin of the individual universes, each with its own individual set of laws. So what determines the meta-laws? Either we must introduce meta-meta-laws, and so on in infinite regression, or we must hold that the meta-laws themselves are necessary — and so we have in effect just changed our understanding of what the fundamental universe is to one that contains many universes. In that case, we are still left without ultimate explanations as to why that universe exists or has the characteristics it does.

When it comes to such metaphysical questions, science and scientific speculation may offer much in fleshing out details, but they have so far failed to offer any explanations that are fundamentally novel to philosophy — much less have they supplanted it entirely.

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As you may know, I gave my notice at the First Court of Appeals this week. I am leaving the practice of law in order to start a software company, Cereblitz!

I will be developing and marketing an ecommerce platform for selling customizable products, such as products that can be imprinted with text or logos or have other user specifications. I have mentioned the software before, but now I am going to be working on it full-time.

This platform is one-of-a-kind: there is nothing else out there that is available to small and medium-sized businesses for selling customizable products!

I need your help getting the word out! Please help me by doing at least one of the following:

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I had problems recently with my iPhone 6 vibrating randomly. I didn’t get any alerts, banners, or app icon badges that I could see, so it was driving me a little crazy.

It turns out there are two kinds of mail notifications. The first kind is under Settings > Notifications > Mail. The second, which causes these phantom vibrations, is under Settings > Sounds > New Mail. Head there and change “Vibration” to “None.”

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If you ever make remote connections to a MySQL database, it’s extremely important to connect over SSL. Otherwise, you run the risk of someone seeing data in transit, modifying data in transit, or, worst of all, stealing your credentials. This could be an utter disaster.

Unfortunately, getting MySQL to use SSL is kind of complicated. Here’s how to do it.

Make Sure SSL is Enabled

First, make sure your installation of MySQL supports SSL. Using PHPMyAdmin, a MySQL command-line prompt, or whatever you prefer, run this command:

You should get a result looking something like this:

If you see “DISABLED” next to “have_openssl” and “have_ssl”, great – that means that your copy of MySQL supports SSL. If you see “NO”, you need to recompile or reinstall MySQL. If you see “YES”, you’re already done!

Create SSL Certificates

Now, you need to create some SSL certificates. Go to wherever you want to store them (I’d suggest something like /home/mysql/certs) and run the following commands:

Enter information as needed at the prompts. This will create self-signed client and server keys for you to use. The last two lines are very important! OpenSSL versions 1.0 and newer create keys in the PKCS #8 format, but MySQL expects them to be in the PKCS #1 format, so you have to run these commands to convert the keys we just created. You can read more about that problem in this Ask Ubuntu question: Enabling SSL in MySQL.

Tell MySQL to Use the Certificates

Edit your my.cnf file (probably at /etc/my.cnf) to include the following entries:

(If you used a directory other than /home/mysql/certs above, use it in the entries here.) If your my.cnf file already has mysqld and/or client sections, just add the appropriate entries to those sections.

Restart MySQL. The command varies by system, but will usually be something like service mysql restart.

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DISCLAIMER: Views and opinions expressed are my own and not those of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP. Nothing on this site constitutes legal or financial advice. The author cannot and does not provide legal advice to users of this site. If you need legal advice on any matter, you should contact a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction. The author of this site does not offer financial or business advice. All investments involve risk; you may lose money. Only invest what you can afford to lose, remember that investments have risks and tax consequences, and seek advice from a licensed attorney and a licensed accountant if you have questions.

DISCLAIMER: Views and opinions expressed are my own and not those of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP. Nothing on this site constitutes legal or financial advice. The author cannot and does not provide legal advice to users of this site. If you need legal advice on any matter, you should contact a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction. The author of this site does not offer financial or business advice. All investments involve risk; you may lose money. Only invest what you can afford to lose, remember that investments have risks and tax consequences, and seek advice from a licensed attorney and a licensed accountant if you have questions.